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A governmentwide review has acknowledged for the first time that at least several Trump political appointees violated the administration’s ethics pledge, which was put in place to try to “drain the swamp” by imposing lobbying restrictions and penalties.

The details are tucked away in the Office of Government Ethics’ latest annual report, which attracted little notice when it was released this summer.

While President Donald Trump’s ethics pledge was weaker than previous rules, the government ethics office still found violations in 2018 at three federal agencies: the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior and the National Labor Relations Board.

No federal agency reported a violation of the Trump ethics pledge in 2017.

In December 2017, the labor board overturned the original union-friendly ruling, undoing years of precedent and making it tougher for employees to pursue federal complaints against parent or related companies if they indirectly control employee work conditions. Because of Emanuel’s conflict of interest with Littler, the ruling on the case was ultimately overturned a second time and the labor board’s inspector general called Emanuel’s vote a “serious and flagrant problem and/or deficiency.”

The National Labor Relations Board declined to comment on Emanuel’s ethics violation. Emanuel did not respond to requests for comment.

The report cites an ethics violation by an unnamed presidential appointee at the EPA. Agency officials familiar with the matter said the case involves Bill Wehrum, a former lobbyist and attorney who resigned in June as the agency’s assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation. Wehrum is the subject of several internal EPA investigations and faced questions from the House Energy and Commerce Committee over his communications with his former law firm Hunton & Williams, now known as Hunton Andrews Kurth. The firm represented several EPA-regulated power plant operators.

Wehrum, the chief architect of the Trump administration’s rollback of the Clean Air Act, the EPA and Hunton Andrews Kurth did not respond to requests for comment.

The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the Interior Department in February, alleging that six current and former department staffers violated the ethics pledge, calling it “a disturbing pattern of misconduct” and including one former staffer who went directly from working on energy policy to working for an offshore oil drilling firm. Penalties for violating the pledge include fines and a five-year ban on lobbying.

The Interior Department has yet to make any announcement or ruling on the complaint. But in a statement, the agency said it “immediately consulted with department ethics officials after receiving the Center’s complaint in February. Ethics reviewed each matter and provided materials to the chief of staff, who has taken appropriate actions. All of these materials have been provided to the Inspector General.”

Influence peddling in federal politics is not new; in the Obama administration, appointees in both the Interior Department and the EPA were found to have violated his version of the ethics pledge by talking with former business clients.

The difference, ethics experts who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations say, is both the lack of enforcement and the dearth of information coming from certain federal agencies and the White House about its missteps.

“The White House Counsel’s office has taken the lead in making excuses for ethics violations,” said Kathleen Clark, a professor specializing in legal ethics at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. “There’s examples of the White House refusing to impose any sanction for officials found to have committed violations. They’re setting quite the example.”

In the first two years of the Trump administration, 3,887 political appointees — from Cabinet secretaries and acting chiefs to special and confidential assistants — signed the Trump ethics pledge. Of those thousands of political appointees, 116 were registered lobbyists in the two years immediately before starting government service, or roughly 3 percent.

Employees who signed Trump’s ethics pledge are not allowed to work on “any particular matters” they previously lobbied on. By contrast, the Obama administration banned lobbyists from working at agencies they previously lobbied.

Trump’s ethics pledge also bars those exiting the government from lobbying for five years — except we’ve found dozens of cases of staffers who’ve gone on to do exactly that.

The EPA and the Interior Department, along with other federal agencies, are no strangers to ethics issues over the past 2 1/2 years.

Former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general, resigned in July 2018 after a tumultuous tenure that saw more than a dozen different federal investigations into ethical and legal allegations, including his lease of a bedroom in a condo linked to a Canadian energy company’s Washington lobbying firm. (Pruitt’s attorney, Cleta Mitchell, told The Washington Post, that ethics rules had been unfairly “weaponized in order to destroy political opponents” like Pruitt and that he was “enemy No. 1” when he left the EPA. Pruitt is now working with coal baron Joseph W. Craft III and as an energy consultant and paid speaker while “in full compliance with both the letter and the spirit of the law,” Mitchell said.) Current EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist, had at least three meetings with former clients as Pruitt’s deputy, according to calendars obtained by the trade publication E&E News.

With a deranged narcissist in the Oval Office and his lackey controlling the Department of Justice, there is no point in looking to the federal government to curb police violence. Instead, President Donald J. Trump will do everything in his power to encourage it. In the wake of protests over the murder of George Floyd, he has demanded that governors crack down on protestors: "You have to dominate. ... If you don't dominate, you're wasting your time," he told them.

Moreover, most local police authorities are under local control -- mayors, city councils, district attorneys, police chiefs, sheriffs. That's where the accountability for police misconduct begins.

<p>But Congress could take a significant step toward reining in that misconduct by passing a bill to end the practice of allowing the Pentagon to give surplus war equipment to local police departments. There is simply no good reason for police in any city -- from Washington to Wichita -- to roll down the streets in armored personnel carriers, armed with battering rams and grenade launchers. They are not going to war. American citizens are not enemy combatants.</p><p>Several Democrats have already announced their intention to introduce legislation to end the practice. Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, has said he would introduce such a measure as an amendment to the all-important annual defense policy bill -- which would give it a decent shot at passing since Republicans are deeply invested in the defense bill.</p><script async="" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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</script><p>After protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer, local law enforcement authorities took to the streets in armored carriers, further inflaming tensions. They showed little inclination toward restraint or de-escalation. The same thing is occurring in cities around the country right now.</p><p>Off-loading surplus military hardware to local police departments was never a good idea. The practice started back during the 1990s as violent crime peaked and local and federal authorities were feverishly devoted to winning the so-called war on drugs. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the program ramped up, doling out battlefield gear even to small towns no self-respecting terrorist ever heard of.</p><p>Law enforcement agents became enamored of images of themselves decked out like soldiers on special-ops missions. According to <em>The New York Times</em>, the website of a South Carolina sheriff's department featured its SWAT team "dressed in black with guns drawn, flanking an armored vehicle that looks like a tank and has a mounted .50-caliber gun."</p><p>Poor neighborhoods are subjected to the military-style hardware much more often than affluent ones. And the consequence of that sort of policing is often less safety, not more. When the police behave like an occupying force, the residents return the favor -- treating them with suspicion and contempt. That hardly makes it more likely that police will get the information they need to solve crimes.</p><p>The administration of President Barack Obama understood that and curbed the Pentagon program after Ferguson. In the final years of the Obama administration, the Pentagon reported that local law enforcement agencies had returned 126 tracked armored vehicles, 138 grenade launchers and 1,623 bayonets, the Times said. Pause for a moment just to consider that. Why would any police department -- even New York City's army of 36,000 officers -- need bayonets and grenade launchers? Once you implant in the heads of police officers the notion that they need battlefield gear, their use of violence against unarmed citizens escalates as a natural consequence.</p><script async="" src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>
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</script><p>But guess what happened when Trump took office? He removed Obama's restraints on the Pentagon program, once again allowing local law enforcement agents to go to battle against the citizens they are sworn to protect. No surprise there. In 2017, Trump gave a speech in which he urged police officers not to worry about injuring a suspect during an arrest.</p><p>Police violence against black people is a problem as old as the nation itself. It didn't start with Trump's presidency and won't end when it's over. Rather, the racist culture that is embedded among so many law enforcement agencies showed itself clearly when major police unions enthusiastically backed Trump's election. When Trump is finally gone, the campaign to eradicate that culture can begin in earnest.</p>